Thinking Out Loud

By Gerard Meister

Thinking Out Loud

By Gerard Meister

As my constant readers know, I’ve lived in Palm Beach County Florida for the past twenty years. And all during this period I noticed some strange anomalies about life here. For instance you are able – should you so desire – to eat a full seven course “Super Early Bird” dinner between 3:30 and 4:00 PM.

Another example is when the time comes; Palm Beachites are able to secure an eternal resting place in a condo mausoleum where a location with a water view costs extra. (You can’t make things like this up folks!)

But strangest of all is the inability of many of the voters in the County to properly execute a ballot. And for the handful of ballots that are properly executed, the powers that be can’t find enough people who can count correctly or at all (in some instances).

Case in point: we now have a “fool proof computer,” fully digitized with a large ‘touch screen’ voting ballot and a back-up paper trail so nothing can go wrong. Except, of course, in Palm Beach County, when on August 26 an election for Circuit Court judge was held and the following scenario unfolded:

• Initially the challenger, William Abramson, led the incumbent, Richard Wennet by only 58 votes, so a recount was ordered.
• The recount held in a secure concrete-block facility called the Tabulation Center where some 3500 ballots turned up missing
• At first it was thought that the ballots were inadvertently thrown out because someone said that some ballots were delivered in a brown garbage instead of the official canvas ballot bag,
• This turned out to be a hallucination of some sort because the missing ballots were indeed in the Tabulation Center all along, but misplaced, so another recount was ordered
• After a couple of other recounts were ordered (the fifth or sixth, I lost track), Abramson’s lead rose to 115 votes and claimed the election
• But Wennet the incumbent judge went to court, claiming Florida law allows only 2 recounts (some interpretations’ of the law say: one recount)
• Officials are now planning to hold a new election on November 4^th, to settle the matter “once and for all.”

I’ll keep you posted.

Epilogue: This might be an apocryphal story, but is alleged that during the contentious 2004, Bush/Kerry election a group of non-ambulatory nursing home residents were given a write-in ballot and Harry Truman won in a landslide.